Background
Giuseppe Balsamo was born on 2 June in 1743 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish Quarter of Palermo, Sicily.
adventurer self-styled magician
Giuseppe Balsamo was born on 2 June in 1743 in Palermo, Sicily, Italy to a poor family in Albergheria, which was once the old Jewish Quarter of Palermo, Sicily.
Alessandro received the rudiments of his education at the monastery of Caltagirone in Sicily but was expelled from it for misconduct and disowned by his relations.
In early 1768 Balsamo left for Rome, where he managed to land himself a job as a secretary to Cardinal Orsini. The job proved boring to Balsamo and he soon started leading a double life, selling magical "Egyptian" amulets and engravings pasted on boards and painted over to look like paintings. Of the many Sicilian expatriates and ex-convicts he met during this period, one introduced him to a seventeen-year-old girl named Lorenza Seraphina Feliciani (ca. 8 April 1751 – 1794), known as Serafina, whom he married 1768.
The couple moved in with Lorenza's parents and her brother in the vicolo delle Cripte, adjacent to the strada dei Pellegrini. Balsamo's coarse language and the way he incited Lorenza to display her body contrasted deeply with her parents' deep-rooted religious beliefs. After a heated discussion, the young couple left.
At this point Balsamo befriended Agliata, a forger and swindler, who proposed to teach Balsamo how to forge letters, diplomas and myriad other official documents. In return, though, Agliata sought sexual intercourse with Balsamo's young wife, a request to which Balsamo acquiesced.
The couple traveled together to London, where Balsamo, now styling himself with one of several pseudonyms and self-conferred titles before settling on "Count Alessandro di Cagliostro", allegedly met the Comte de Saint-Germain. Cagliostro traveled throughout Europe, especially to Courland, Russia, Poland, Germany, and later France. His fame grew to the point that he was even recommended as a physician to Benjamin Franklin during a stay in Paris.
On April 12, 1776 "Joseph Cagliostro" was admitted as a Freemason of the Esperance Lodge No. 289 in Gerrard Street, Soho, London. In December 1777 Cagliostro and Serafina left London for the mainland, after which they travelled through various German states, visiting lodges of the Rite of Strict Observance looking for converts to Cagliostro's "Egyptian Freemasonry". In February 1779 Cagliostro traveled to Mitau, where he met the poetess Elisa von der Recke. In September 1780, after failing in Saint Petersburg to win the patronage of Russian Tsaritsa Catherine the Great, the Cagliostros made their way to Strasbourg, at that time in France. In October 1784, the Cagliostros travelled to Lyon. On December 24, 1784 they founded the co-Masonic mother lodge La Sagesse Triomphante of his rite of Egyptian Freemasonry at Lyon. In January 1785, Cagliostro and his wife went to Paris in response to the entreaties of Cardinal Rohan.
Bust of Giuseppe Balsamo by Jean-Antoine Houdon, 1786
Cagliostro was prosecuted in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace which involved Marie Antoinette and Prince Louis de Rohan, and was held in the Bastille for nine months but finally acquitted, when no evidence could be found connecting him to the affair. Nonetheless, he was banished from France by order of Louis XVI, and departed for England. There he was accused by French expatriate Theveneau de Morande of being Giuseppe Balsamo, which he denied in his published Open Letter
Cagliostro left England to visit Rome, where he met two people who proved to be spies of the Inquisition. Some accounts hold that his wife was the one who initially betrayed him to the Inquisition. On 27 December 1789, he was arrested and imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Soon afterwards he was sentenced to death on the charge of being a Freemason. The Pope changed his sentence, however, to life imprisonment in the Castel Sant'Angelo.
He was tried and condemned to death for being a heretic, but the sentence was commuted to perpetual imprisonment, while his wife was immured in a convent.
After attempting to escape he was relocated to the Fortress of San Leo where he died not long after.
After further travels on the continent he returned to London, where he posed as the founder of a new system of freemasonry, and was well received in the best society, being adored by the ladies.
At Rome, Alessandro Scarlatti married to a beautiful but unprincipled woman, Lorenza Feliciani, with whom he traveled, under different names, through many parts of Europe.